I am visiting New York City from Charlottesville when I can. I visited for Labor Day weekend 2018 arriving Thursday 30 August and leaving Sunday 2 September. Fabian is one of the more active people in his union, IATSE Local 798, and I imagined that we would join the Labor Day march but I had forgotten that this event is often outside the holiday weekend. That makes sense, because people who unionize are people who could use the long holiday.
On Thursday we stayed at home. Fabian had gotten a new extra pen for the chinchillas. Now they have their main pen in the living room and a smaller pen as part of their section where they run loose in the bedroom. We improved chinchilla security and now about 25% of the bedroom is a chinchilla pen. We consistently put all 3 of them there and there have been no escapes. Feeling confident with this, Fabian got a tall condo for the corner. It is a multi-story pen which they can enter and exit as they like while in the larger pen. We are not anticipating a need to close them in this pen but they like it for privacy. Sometimes chinchillas like to step away from action and refresh in a more enclosed area.
I talked with Wayne. He has a slipped disc and is in the process of various treatment options. He is taking physical therapy, has tried less invasive surgery, is talking about the potential of future more invasive surgery, and also not rushing into a decision as he considers his situation. Life can change so quickly. He had no injury recently to bring on this problem, and has had no injury in the past. From his perspective his back began to ache a few months ago then suddenly this turned into fairly consistent sharp pain. Anyone can suddenly have a health problem and sometimes there is no predicting it. Whenever I see such things I always feel glad that health problems can never happen to me. The feeling is not realistic at all but feelings often do not make sense.
On Friday we went for coffee at Little Skips. Since we discovered nearby Whiskers, perhaps the only vegan coffeehouse in NYC, we have preferred to go there. However, Whiskers does not have room for rowdy dogs and on cool days the dogs want to go for a walk and sit at the coffeehouse with us. On the mornings of this trip we went to Skips for chats and to get the dogs out. Since it was Labor Day we talked about the union, current issues with workers, the union’s efforts to use digital media to connect more workers to support in case of difficulty, and what it means to have a union covering an increasingly large region with digital tools.
Sahaj was my housemate in Charlottesville until I moved into the CHUVA coop in July. He graduated that summer with the education he needed to take his CPA exams and he got a job in NYC at Ernst and Young. He had done undergraduate education in New York and was happy for lots of reasons – graduation, getting a job, getting a job in a place he liked, and getting whatever permission he needed to work in the United States. He is from Chandigarh and talks with other students from India seeking jobs in the United States, as would be expected, and this group shares the common NRI experience in the United States. From what he said, no one understood how to predict when someone will get US government permission. From his perspective people who all seem qualified all apply for permission but only about half of them actually get their documents approved. When people are rejected there is no explanation, and there seems to be no way to learn how the government makes decisions. His situation was that he had the degree and he had the job offer but he did not necessarily have the governmental approval to work.
He and I had talked about the United States visa system and the current globalization. Obviously this was very important to him and his social circle because they wanted to work in the United States, but to hear him explain it, the perception of the process was that it was random. If a group of people are all minimally qualified, with the minimum being professional qualification and a job offer to a highly skilled role, then in that pool there is no way to predict whom the government will select. He said that the thought the US government policy was foolish and outdated to be biased against skilled immigration because the companies are going to hire people anyway. Either the government gives work permits and visas and these immigrants work in the United States and pay taxes to the United States, or otherwise the government denies the visa and the company still offers the person the same job at the same pay, but they work in a different country. Singapore and Hong Kong are alternatives for people who do not get US visas but the Big Four Accounting Firms have offices everywhere.
Whatever the case, Sahaj is living and working in NYC and has been for a few weeks. He is trying whatever culture NYC has to offer and I invited him to a Broadway show. Before the show we met at Beyond Sushi, a vegan sushi place. Sahaj remarked that he did not know how to use chopsticks. He will change a lot living in NYC.
Fabian and I planned to go see Chicago as it was his first time and he had no preferences. Chicago is a nice show, it has been popular for 40 years, and it teaches American history about crime culture in Chicago in the 20s. The idea that people would want to be beautiful and awful in the media is also an American idea. After the show I asked him if he thought the good guys came out ahead in the storyline. He said not at all. We went from Times Square to Hell’s Kitchen to Blazing Saddles, a themed gay bar. He said that all his gay coworkers live in this neighborhood. Things change so quickly in NYC, as just a few years ago this neighborhood was much less desirable to anyone.
On Saturday we went to Wigstock 2018 which I describe in its own post.
On Sunday we went to Riis Beach. Fabian and I both prefer to be in gay communities and Riis beach is the gay beach. It is at the end of the A line. Gay beaches always are at an end and no one crosses them to get anywhere else. It was a lovely warm day with lots of guys around. We walked on the beach, had a picnic, relaxed in the sun, and watched the waves.
On Monday we went for coffee again and I told Fabian about my job. We talk every day but still there are not enough hours. I only remember this because we had gone for coffee every morning and because I had been working for a few months now. I know there are always new perspectives to share about any specific field and Fabian and I do not make a point to discuss work but still I found it fun to talk about what I am doing. It crossed my mind that even though I am working hours a day, and I talk with Fabian daily, and we have been together for years, there are so many parts of his daily activity which I do not understand at all and so many broad concerns in my life that I have not had time to mention to him. Still every time we go to the beach I have a thought about how long the waves have been coming and going. It seems surprising every time I visit to see the natural world in action, doing something in an observable way without humans controlling it.
When it was time for me to go I tried using Google Maps to tell me how to travel to LaGuardia Airport. This seems like it ought to be a common enough request – surely millions of people have queried Google for a way to get to this very busy airport. With me working in data science now I again noticed and thought about how Google Maps does not yet know the transit lines in NYC or cannot recommend the obvious ways to get to places that a human would know. Google Maps recommended a circuitous path which would have taken 30 minutes longer than going to a particular transit hub. When I saw Google give strange directions I had to consider whether Google knew something which I did not. Perhaps Google was getting live updates and knew that the transit station or line was closed. I did a little research and did not see a closure alert, and had to make a decision about either following Google’s advice or using my previous experience of showing up to a transit station and hoping a shuttle would be there. Fabian and I talked it over and we went to the station at Jackson Heights. The bus was there and I saved time. I was wondering – when will Google have whatever data they need to map the obvious path for someone to get from Manhattan to the airport? Will the day come when people with devices can trust their maps to direct them between major urban hubs to the airport? I think when that day comes maybe there will be no great notice of it because even obvious gaps like this one are hard to perceive. Probably in retrospect, like if anyone in the future tells a story of this era, the depiction will either show technology working or not existing. We are in an odd transitional period where practically everyone is using this technology, and yet the technology still has fundamental gaps in it.